Sections

Section
1:
Introduction

Henry Ford's invention of the assembly line at the start of the last century introduced the concept of mass production that revolutionized how consumer products were manufactured. Prior to Ford's invention, each car was built individually by a team of skilled mechanics expert in virtually all aspects of automotive assembly. Ford realized that, by making each car identical to the next, he could eliminate the need for tradesmen skilled in all stages of assembly. Instead, the assembly could be broken down so that each mechanic worked at a station specializing in just a single phase of the process. Cars would be passed down a line from station to station as identical copies of each product were built, reducing costs and improving efficiency.

When Henry Ford was growing up, children who lived in rural parts of the country typically attended school in a one-room schoolhouse. Henry Ford went to such a school for eight years of his life. Ironically, as Henry Ford grew up, not only did our nation inherit the innovations he pioneered for mass-producing consumer-products, but we also moved toward a wholesale adoption of a system of education that in many ways resembled the assembly-line process Ford used to manufacture cars. Though the suggestion that schools treat children as if they are cars on an assembly line is in many ways preposterous, the belief persists that our current school system works best, matriculating students with the greatest efficiency, when children can be treated as if they are identical, one to the next, passed from station to station down a line from kindergarten to graduation.

Advances in Genetics and Neuroscience

While educators were grappling with the changing metaphors for teaching and learning, the fields of genetics and neuroscience had been undergoing revolutions of their own. Efforts to map the human genome gained momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s, and technologies for genetic analysis became cost-effective and widely accessible.

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Advances in Genetics and Neuroscience

Dr. Joanna A. Christodoulou works at the intersection of education and neuroscience with roles as a scientist (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), clinician (Children's Hospital, Boston), instructor/professor (Harvard University; Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at MGH Institute of Health Professions), and practitioner.

While educators were grappling with the changing metaphors for teaching and learning, the fields of genetics and neuroscience had been undergoing revolutions of their own. Efforts to map the human genome gained momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s, and technologies for genetic analysis became cost-effective and widely accessible. For the first time, it became practical to identify the genetic makeup of thousands upon thousands of people for a single research study, making it possible to understand how individuals compare in their genetic makeup. The intersection of genetics and education suggested that we might finally understand learning from the very basis of a person's being. However, rather than simplifying the story, the genetics of learning revealed a complex and intertwined narrative complicated by factors such as a person's development, the influence of genes on one another, and the context or environment. To date, no single gene has been discovered to determine the kind of learner a person will be. Even focusing on a specific learning disability such as dyslexia has revealed that multiple genes are potential contributors to that learning profile. Most important, scientists showed that the labels commonly used in education, like dyslexia, are not reflective of how genes are organized.

One advance in genetics and neuroscience that has reshaped the field comes from the Generalist Genes Hypothesis by Robert Plomin and Yulia Kovas, geneticists who argued that learning abilities and disabilities stem from the same genes. Have damaged genes for math? Damaged genes for reading? Not quite: This hypothesis offers a scientific basis for why academic difficulties do not come down to a "gene for X." In fact, genes underlying difficulties in one area—like reading—are often implicated in another—like math.

At the same time the field of genetics was undergoing a revolution, neuroscience was experiencing its own advances. Sophisticated brain imaging techniques became more common research tools by the end of the last century, allowing scientists to "look" into the brains of living, awake individuals, noninvasively, to investigate activity in the brain. Rather than relying on individuals with a brain injury to determine how the brain processes information, scientists could answer questions about how brain areas work together to achieve the feat of learning, whether that referred to juggling, reading, or musical talent. So much remains to be discovered about the workings of the brain as they relate to learning. To date, however, the brain has become appreciated as a dynamic, interactive, plastic, and complex organ that continues to reveal itself slowly through neuroimaging experiments about typical and atypical development. Even our understanding of the visual cortex, housed in the back of the head, has evolved: blind individuals recruit the visual cortex.

Glossary

visual cortex

An alternate term for the occipital lobe, located in the back of the brain, that is primarily responsible for processing of visual information.

Obviously, children are not identically produced cars, and schools are not assembly lines. And yet, one of the greatest challenges facing teachers in the classroom is how to address the tremendous diversity present in each and every class, and cope with the range of learning differences a classroom can present. Students can differ in the way they learn for any number of reasons. These reasons can be socioeconomic: perhaps the student needs to take on an afterschool job to help out with the family and doesn't have time to study. Or, the reasons can be socio-cultural: perhaps the student is frequently up all night texting or playing video games and isn't getting the sleep she or he needs to learn effectively. Other reasons may be related to how students process information, such as whether they have difficulty sounding out words from their spellings, or whether they are easily distracted.

While the range of factors that determines the diversity of learning in a given classroom (top)

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can be exceedingly broad and complex, certain aspects of this diversity can be understood in terms of neuroscience. In this unit, we will examine some neurological factors that influence learning diversity, and will begin to think about the strategies that teachers can adopt to begin to address the needs a typical classroom presents.

Richard Konicek-Moran liked to tell the following story based on his research. He taught in New England where the weather is cold. All his students knew that when it's cold outside, you put on a down jacket to stay warm. Konicek-Moran was curious why his students thought the coat kept them warm. So, he gave his students thermometers and asked them to predict what would happen if their thermometer was wrapped up in a cocoon of down. Virtually all of his students predicted the temperature would go up. But, when they tried the experiment, they were surprised to see that wrapping a thermometer in down didn't make the temperature reading increase. Many blamed their equipment. They insisted that their thermometer had to be broken. So, they tried thermometer after thermometer only to discover that all of the thermometers in the classroom had to be broken! Very few arrived at the expected scientific explanation: that the jacket is just an insulator, incapable of generating its own heat.

Warm Jackets Generate Heat?

Interviewer Michael Filisky asks students to predict what will happen when a thermometer is wrapped and left inside a warm jacket. Their experiences with jackets result in a misconception that is...

In this example, the cause of the students' learning difficulties was clear. The children grew up in New England where it's cold, and their experience with down jackets led them to believe that down generates heat. But, in many cases, we can't so easily understand why some children appear to have difficulty learning. All too often, if we don't get the results we expect, when we don't understand, just like Koniceck-Moran's middle school students, we tend to blame the equipment: The child isn't learning because the child is "broken." Sometimes, we even go so far as to label children as "learning disabled": unteachable and incapable of learning.

As we'll discover in the following sections, neuroscience tells us that it's not that the child is "broken," but rather that our teaching approach may be inappropriate, given the needs of the child. Neuroscience can provide clues as to why certain forms of learning can be difficult for some people but easy for others. Armed with this knowledge, there are many things teachers can do to help students learn more effectively, and these are some of the ideas we will explore in this unit.